Any views expressed in Ryan's writings are his own at the time of writing and do not represent the views of any employer, organization, or affiliate. Sharing an excerpt from a book does not imply agreement with that excerpt.

Recommended Reading

Fiction: The Brothers Karamazov, Anna Karenina, War and Peace, Growth of the Soil (Hamsun), Pan (Hamsun), The Great Gatsby, East of Eden, Independent People (Laxness), Moby-Dick (Melville), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, The Aeneid, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Atlas Shrugged, Hamlet, King Lear, Steppenwolf (Hesse), Travels with Charley (Steinbeck), Dandelion Wine (Bradbury), A River Runs Through It, True North (Harrison), Returning to Earth (Harrison), The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea (Mishima), Catch-22, The Sorrows of Young Werther (Goethe), Dubliners (Joyce), Complete Stories of John Cheever.

Other: Human Action (Mises), From Dawn to Decadence and Begin Here (Barzun), On Liberty (Mill), Letter Concerning Toleration (Locke), Letters and Papers from Prison (Bonhoeffer), Theory of Int'l Politics (Waltz), War & Change in World Politics (Gilpin), The Concept of the Political (Schmitt), Just & Unjust Wars (Walzer), The Eternal Now and Systematic Theology (Tillich), The Evolution of Cooperation (Axelrod), The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (Mearsheimer), Sources of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean Tradition (de Bary), Korea's Place in the Sun (Cumings), Europe: A History (Davies), The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (Burckhardt).

19 May 2012

Last summer and fall, I did a bit of research to try and identify books and study aids that might be helpful during my first year of law school. There are hundreds of products out there, and some are considerably more useful than others. I wanted to put together a list of the books I found to be most valuable for any incoming law students (or self-educators interested in reading about law) who might be interested:

Goethe, The Sorrows of Young WertherWilliam Golding, Lord of the FliesJohn Grisham, The Client; The Runaway Jury; The FirmKnut Hamsun, Growth of the Soil; Pan; Victoria; DreamersJim Harrison, Returning to Earth and True NorthHebrew Bible / Old Testament: Ecclesiastes, Job, Genesis, Song of Songs, Exodus, HebrewsJoseph Heller, Catch-22Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls; The Old Man and the SeaHerman Hesse, Steppenwolf; SiddharthaHomer, Iliad, OdysseyVictor Hugo, Les MiserablesHenrik Ibsen, A Doll's HouseJames Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; DublinersJack Kerouac, On the Road; The Dharma BumsJon Krakauer, Into the WildHalldor Laxness, Independent PeopleHarper Lee, To Kill a MockingbirdThomas Mann, The Magic MountainGeorge R.R. Martin, A Song of Ice and Fire (series)Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude; Chronicle of a Death ForetoldNorman Maclean, A River Runs Through ItHerman Melville, Moby Dick, Billy BuddArthur Miller, The CrucibleYukio Mishima, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea; Confessions of a MaskCzeslaw Milosz, Native RealmThe New Testament: John, Luke, Revelations, JamesAyn Rand, Atlas Shrugged; We the Living; The Fountainhead; AnthemWilliam Shakespeare, King Lear; Hamlet; Othello; Julius Caesar; Macbeth; Richard IINatsume Soseki, KokoroJohn Steinbeck, East of Eden; Travels with Charley; The Grapes of Wrath; The Pearl; The Red Pony; Junius MaltbyJ.R.R. Tolkier, The Lord of the Rings; The HobbitLeo Tolstoy, War and Peace; Anna Karenina; The Death of Ivan IlyichVirgil, AeneidKurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-5Elie Wiesel, Night

Shel Silverstein, The Giving Tree; The Missing Piece; Where the Sidewalk Ends; A Light in the Attic

Jerry Spinelli, Maniac Magee

E.B. White, Charlotte's Web

Politics, History, and Social Sciences:

Stephen Arons, Compelling Belief: The Culture of American SchoolingRobert Axelrod, The Evolution of CooperationDavid Baldwin, Neorealism and Neoliberalism: The Contemporary DebateRandy Barnett, The Structure of LibertyW.M. Theodore de Bary, Sources of Chinese Tradition; Sources of Japanese Tradition; Sources of Korean TraditionJacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence; Begin Here: The Forgotten Conditions of Teaching and LearningFrederic Bastiat, The LawAllan Bloom, The Closing of the American MindJacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in ItalyBruce Cumings, Korea's Place in the SunNorman Davies, Europe: A HistoryWilliam O. Douglas, The Douglas LettersW.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black FolkVictor Frankl, Man's Search for MeaningSigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the EgoFrancis Fukuyama, America at the CrossroadsJ.K. Galbraith, The Good SocietyRobert Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics; The Meaning of the Nuclear Revolution; Global Political EconomyJonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth CenturyFriedrich Hayek, The Road to SerfdomChris Hedges, War is a Force that Gives Us MeaningE.D. Hirsch, The Knowledge DeficitRobert Maynard Hutchins, Education for FreedomNicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women WorldwideDoug Lemov, Teach Like a ChampionJohn Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration; 2nd Treatise on Civil GovernmentJohn J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power PoliticsJohn Stuart Mill, On Liberty; AutobiographyLudwig Von Mises, Human ActionBarack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and InheritanceMurray N. Rothbard, Man, Economy, and State; For a New Liberty; What Has Government Done to Our Money?Snell and Gail Putney, The Adjusted American: Normal Neurosis in the Individual and SocietyJean-Jacques Rousseau, On the Social ContractScott Sagan and Kenneth Waltz, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: A Debate RenewedCarl Schmitt, The Concept of the PoliticalHarvey Silverglate, FIRE's Guide to First-Year Orientation and Thought Control; FIRE's Guide to Free Speech on CampusVoltaire, Political WritingsKenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics; Man, the State, and WarMichael Walzer, Just and Unjust WarsJack Welch, Winning

Charles Wheelan, Naked Economics

Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States; A Power Governments Cannot Suppress

11 July 2011

I've become increasingly interested in the history of the 1930s, and I just finished Eric Rauchway's The Great Depression and the New Deal: A Very Short Introduction. It has become increasingly clear to me that there are major holes in the dominant historical narrative about the Great Depression, the New Deal, and the Roosevelt administration. The standard, high-school-textbook version of the story goes something like this:

"Greedy stock market speculators caused the stock market crash of 1929, which triggered the worst depression in American history; President Herbert Hoover believed in an outdated laissez-faire economic philosophy, so he did nothing; thankfully, President Roosevelt was elected, and his New Deal policies saved capitalism and helped the common man survive the Great Depression; and finally, World War II was an enormous boon to the U.S. economy, and it finally solved the problem once and for all."

Those of us with a preference for economic liberty and peace should be greatly disturbed by this story. If true, it suggests that the best ways to fix a broken economy are (1) total war, including conscription; and (2) dramatic increases in government taxation, spending, regulation, and redistribution.

Thankfully, there are convincing reasons to believe that the standard narrative is wrong. There is a lot more I need to read on the topic, but here are some resources and ideas that I look forward to exploring further:

-George Selgin, "The Economics of America's Great Depression" (course syllabus in PDF format with many links to readings). My interest in this topic is largely attributable to a fantastic lecture I heard Selgin deliver in June.

06 July 2011

"What was sold to the American public as a humanitarian intervention morphed almost immediately into unreserved support of one side in Libya's civil war and a commitment to overthrowing Libya's existing government....To decide whether a military action undertaken in our name is prudent and just, we must adopt a skeptical stance toward politicians' stories and rationalizations. We must attempt to see through these to the reality of the situation.

Stories can change, and new excuses can be spun, but once a war is launched there is no predicting the course it will take or the consequences it will have. Wars rarely go according to plan; they set in motion a course of events that no one person or group of people can hope to control."

Click here to read the entire article. Please consider posting it on Facebook or Twitter, or otherwise passing it along to others if you enjoy it. Thanks, as always, for reading.

"The expediency of drones makes it all-too-tempting for governments to use them frequently and carelessly, brushing aside the ethical questions they raise and ignoring the long-term security consequences their use could entail."

14 June 2011

Customs grow out of social processes whose details are highly individuated in regards to the type of activity, the individuals involved, their reputational pedigree, the knowledge they have about each other, and so on. Viewing cultural evolution as deeply and densely rooted process may make one doubt the wisdom of government attempts to fine tune, guide, or supplant it. It is highly unlikely that the blunt instruments of government will be well suited to cultivating the growth of delicate, teeming, unique interactions.

01 May 2011

Thanks to Henry Holt and Company for sending a review copy of Orlando Figes' The Crimean War: A History." I look forward to reading it.

Authors and publishers interested in sending review copies of books in the social sciences or humanities - especially education and international relations - should contact me by email at ryan (dot) mccarl (at) wideawakeminds (dot) com.

30 April 2011

The following is political philosopher Robert Nozick's incredible allegory of the "Experience Machine," from his book Anarchy, State, and Utopia. The allegory makes a case against hedonism, the idea that sensory pleasure is the highest good:

---
Suppose there were an experience machine that would give you any experience you desired.

26 April 2011

My latest op-ed, "Rolling the dice in Libya," appeared today on Antiwar.com.

You can find the op-ed here as well as pasted below. If you enjoy it, please consider sharing it on your Facebook wall, mentioning it on Twitter, or emailing it to a friend. Thanks, as always, for reading.

---

Rolling the dice in Libya

Ryan McCarl

President Barack Obama won the Democratic nomination in 2008 partly by reminding the party’s base of his early, prescient criticisms of the ill-fated decision to invade Iraq. “What I am opposed to is a dumb war … a rash war,” then-Senator Obama explained in 2002.

04 March 2011

(Note: The excerpts below are related to issues outside of education; I will post education-related excerpts from From Dawn to Decadence on Wide Awake Minds, my education blog. You can find these here if you are interested.)

Here are a few excerpts from what I've read so far:

---

In any art a new technical power leads to uses and ideas not suspected at first.
...
Another singularity in Petrarch's life was that he climbed a high hill in southern France in order to admire the view. If it was done before him, it was not recorded. Nature had been endlessly discussed, but as a generality, not as this landscape.

...
Inquisition as such, that is, apart from methods and severity of results, has remained a live institution. The many dictatorships of the 20th century have relied on it and in free countries it thrives ad hoc - hunting down German sympathizers during the First World War, interning Japanese-Americans during the second, and pursuing Communist fellow-travelers during the Cold War.
...

"Heretics are given us so that we might not remain in infancy. They question, there is discussion, and definitions are arrived at to make an organized faith." -St. Augustine

...
It takes hundreds of the gifted to make half a dozen of the great.

27 November 2009

Happy Thanksgiving weekend! I am spending it in Boulder, CO, one of the most beautiful cities in America.

From "Static Poems"

Deafness to imperatives
is profundity in the wise man,
children and grandchildren
don't bother him,
don't alarm him.

To represent a particular outlook,
to act,
to travel hither and yon
are all signs of a world
that doesn't see clearly.

--Gottfried Benn
(in Poetry, 11/09.)

Adult authoritarians tend to be highly ethnocentric and heavy users of the "consensual validation pill" (Newcomb, 1961). They travel in tight circles of like-minded people so much, they often think their views are commonly held in society, that they are the "Moral Majority" or the "Silent Majority." It has been hard to miss the evidence that certain kinds of religious training have sometimes helped produce their ethnocentrism and authoritarianism.

...(They) are scared. They see the world as a dangerous place, as society teeters on the brink of self-destruction from evil and violence. This fear appears to instigate aggression in them. Second, right-wing authoritarians tend to be highly self-righteous. They think themselves much more moral and upstanding than others - a self-perception considerably aided by self-deception, their religious training, and some very efficient guilt evaporators (such as going to confession). This self-righteousness disinhibits their aggressive impulses, and releases them to act out their fear-induced hostilities....

07 November 2009

My latest op-ed, "Two cents about COIN," appeared today on Antiwar.com. It discusses the the growing faith of U.S. political and military leaders in the military doctrine of COIN, or manpower-intensive counterinsurgency warfare.

You can find the op-ed here as well as pasted below; if you enjoy it, please consider sharing it on your Facebook wall, mentioning it on Twitter, or linking to it on your blog. Thanks, as always, for reading.

---

Two Cents About COIN

Ryan McCarl

The war in Afghanistan, according to Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s recent assessment, is "a situation that defies simple solutions or quick fixes. Success demands a comprehensive counterinsurgency (COIN) campaign." McChrystal and other American leaders calling for a "surge" of additional U.S. troops into Afghanistan to mirror the alleged success of the "surge" in Iraq are voicing their belief that the doctrinal framework for the original surge – COIN, or manpower-intensive counterinsurgency warfare – is a widely-applicable tool in asymmetric warfare that the U.S. ought to employ in Afghanistan.

05 November 2009

My latest op-ed, "A limited ecumenism," appeared today in Sightings, the newsletter of the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School. It discusses the Catholic Church's recent outreach to traditionalist Anglicans. Sightings is a free online publication sent out twice a week to over 7,000 scholars, ministers, students, and others interested in the intersection of religion and public life; you can subscribe to it at the Sightings subscription page. Sightings is also online at http://divinity.uchicago.edu/martycenter/publications/sightings/.

You can find the op-ed here as well as pasted below. Thanks, as always, for reading.

---A Limited Ecumenism

Ryan McCarl

As reported in Sightings last Monday, the Vatican announced two weeks ago that it was setting up a new canonical structure, or Apostolic Constitution, to facilitate the conversion of disaffected Anglican traditionalists to Catholicism; the converts will be able to “enter full communion with the Catholic Church while preserving elements of the distinctive Anglican spiritual and liturgical patrimony,” in the Vatican’s words. Married former Anglican clergy will be allowed to become Catholic Priests, though not Bishops.

28 October 2009

My latest op-ed, "Love Thy Neighbor: In the wake of an attack on the Men’s Cross Country team, it’s time to rethink University-community relations," appeared in the Chicago Weekly today.

You can find the op-ed and add your comments here, and I've also pasted it below. Thanks, as always, for reading.

---
Love Thy Neighbor: In the wake of an attack on the Men’s Cross Country team, it’s time to rethink University-community relations

Ryan McCarl

The University of Chicago is a bastion of resources and privilege in a largely underserved and segregated South Side. The University and many of its students regularly engage in outreach and volunteer programs aimed at bridging the gap between the University community and the broader South Side, and Hyde Park is often hailed as one of the most integrated neighborhoods in the United States. But there is an undeniable separation—an invisible wall—between the University and its surroundings.

20 October 2009

Martin Buber and Emanuel Levinas put their faith in the God of relationships. Alles Leben ist Begegnung ('all life is encounter'), declared Buber, and the important thing is to get your relationship with God and with people right (I-Thou, rather than I-It); from that relationship, which is the essence of Revelation, ethical action flows; laws and rules are feeble attempts to capture revelation, and doomed to inadequacy.
...
Genesis 1:27 states clearly enough: 'So God created humankind in his own image; in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.' This implies that in using our concept of God to model human behavior we should not distinguish between male and female.
...
Emil Fackenheim grounds his theology in the actual resistance of Shoah [Holocaust] victims to whom no realistic hope remained: 'A philosophical Tikkun ['repair', 'restoration'] is possible after the Holocaust because a philosophical Tikkun already took place, however fragmentarily, during the Holocaust itself'; the rebirth of Israel, and a new constructive dialogue with a self-critical Christianity, are essential to this process. Fackenheim is also noted for his statement that there should be a 614th commandment, surplus to the 613 of tradition - to survive as Jews, to remember, never to despair of God, lest we hand Hitler a posthumous victory.

12 October 2009

It was after four then, and I lay in the dark, listening to the rain and to the morning trains coming through. They come from Buffalo and Chicago and the Far West, through Albany and down along the river in the early morning, and at one time or another I've traveled on most of them, and I lay in the dark thinking about the polar air in the Pullman cars and the smell of nightclothes and the taste of dining-car water and the way it feels to end a day in Cleveland or Chicago and begin another in New York, particularly after you've been away for a couple of years, and particularly in the summer.
...
I took the eight-ten train into town in the morning and returned on the six-thirty. I knew enough to avoid the empty house in the summer dusk, and I drove directly from the station parking lot to a good restaurant called Orpheo's.

--"The Cure"

"The sun is in your hair."
"What?"
"The sun is in your hair. It's a beautiful color."

28 September 2009

---
An extimate for the period from 1900 until 1989 is that war killed 86 million people. Eighty-six million is a small proportion of all those alive during the ninety years, and is a small number compared to those who have died from hunger and preventable diseases. All the same, death in twentieth-century war has been on a scale which is hard to grasp. ...If these deaths had been spread evenly over the period, war would have killed around 2,500 people every day. That is over 100 people an hour, round the clock, for ninety years.
...
One of this book's aims is to replace the thin, mechanical psychology of the Enlightenment with something more complex, something closer to reality. A consequence of this is to defend the Enlightenment hope of a world that is more peaceful and humane, the hope that by understanding more about ourselves we can do something to create a world with less misery. ...We need to look hard and clearly at some monsters inside us. But this is part of the project of caging and taming them.

04 September 2009

I am currently reading Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning. Frankl, a psychiatrist, was imprisoned in the Nazi concentration camps, including Auschwitz, for several years. He survived the experience and went on to develop the theory of "logotherapy," a branch of psychoanalysis that focuses on human beings' "will to meaning." The part of the book that discusses Frankl's memories of his camp experience is, like any Holocaust memoir worth its salt, extremely disturbing and difficult to read, but it ought to be read in spite of that. Here are a few (non-graphic) excerpts from the book, which I highly recommend:

---
Soon we had resumed the previous day's positions in the ditch. The frozen ground cracked under the point of the pickaxes, and sparks flew. The men were silent, their brains numb. My mind still clung to the image of my wife. A thought crossed my mind: I didn't even know if she were still alive. I knew only one thing - which I have learned well by now: Love goes very far beyond the physical person of the beloved. It finds its deepest meaning in his spiritual being, his inner self. Whether or not he is actually present, whether or not he is still alive at all, ceases somehow to be of importance.
...
If there is a meaning of life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death human life cannot be complete. The way in which a man accepts his fate and all the suffering it entails, the way in which he takes up his cross, gives him ample opportunity - even under the most difficult circumstances - to add a deeper meaning to his life.
...
What was really needed was a fundamental change in our attitude toward life. We had to learn ourselves and, furthermore, we had to teach the despairing men, that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life - daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and right conduct.

24 August 2009

I was sorting through some books in my closet yesterday, and I discovered a fantastic book which drew me away from my regular reading: The Douglas Letters: Selections from the Private Papers of William O. Douglas, edited by Melvin I. Urkofsky. William O. Douglas was a brilliant, contrarian Associate Justice on the Supreme Court as well as a transformative environmentalist and New Dealer who crusaded against rampant speculation and corruption in the financial industry. His writing is insightful and often hilarious. Here are a few samples:

On my visit to Baghdad, I went to the University with my interpreter to see what books, if any, they had on our Constitution or Bill of Rights or Jefferson, Madison, democracy, etc.

That library was bare on those subjects. So when I returned, I prepared what I called the Douglas Eight Foot Shelf which I thought should be in every underdeveloped nation. I thought then - and still think - that those ideas are more important than military missions.

To Max Radin (professor at Berkeley Law School), 5/27/46:

...If you are willing, I will ask you to find me a law clerk each year....I need not only a bright chap, but also a hard-working fellow with a smell for facts as well as for law. I do not want a hide-bound, conservative fellow. What I want is a Max Radin - a fellow who can hold his own in these sophisticated circles and who is not going to end up as a stodgy, hide-bound lawyer. I want the kind of fellow for whom this work would be an exhilaration, who will be going into teaching or into practice of the law for the purpose of promoting the public good. I do not want to fill the big law offices of the country with my law clerks....